


the king's shilling

by bossymarmalade (maggie), maggie



Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: Bisexual Tommy Shelby, Choking, Class Issues, Dysfunctional Family, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Little Brothers, M/M, Masturbation, Power Dynamics, Religious Imagery & Symbolism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-10
Updated: 2019-12-10
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:13:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21742006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maggie/pseuds/bossymarmalade, https://archiveofourown.org/users/maggie/pseuds/maggie
Summary: There were things that Tatiana had to teach Tommy that he couldn't have learned any other way: not on his own, not from his family, not even in the hour he first believed.
Relationships: Tatiana Petrovna/Tommy Shelby, Tommy Shelby/Alfie Solomons
Comments: 6
Kudos: 66





	the king's shilling

**Author's Note:**

> > There's a lot of batshit fuckuppedness that happened when Tatiana around, strange sticky secret things, and I couldn't get them out of my head. Content warnings for Catholicism, underage masturbation, and, uh, Housekeeper Mary living her best life I guess.

_I found her perfume._

_Put it on._

Tommy'd been forced to re-evaluate his estimation of the Duchess' grasp on English both formal and colloquial as he moved towards the bed, moved on top of her, moved inside her with the taste of her brining his lips and the scent of her mingled with Grace's perfume against the side of his face. Pressed there against his cheekbone by the quivering nacre flesh of Tatiana's inner thigh, where she'd anointed herself.

And then as he was thrusting deep into her, one hand tight against the back of her knee as he shoved her leg up, feeling her scraps of seafoam green silk catch and rudder on the callouses of his skin, Tatiana reached for the bottle on the nightstand - he hadn't noticed it, why would he, with her all twisting bunches of hair and dark kestrel eyes and swelling breasts against him - and she slapped the glass stopper of it against the side of Tommy's throat like a bullet. Grace's scent unfolding like a handkerchief in the heat of his blooming sweat, and Tatiana's teeth gleaming in the firelight.

"I said put it _on_."

Tommy went still, breathing fast as he considered whether the thrumming in his chest was anger, or upset, or lust, or something else entirely. He'd never been good at sorting through emotions and sure as hell not when he was balls-deep in someone. And while he was held frozen, brain ticking forward as much as he could force it to, Tatiana dragged the stopper around the the base of his skull, painfully, up into his hair, along the dome of his head until she reached between his eyes with it, and Tommy realized he'd left it too late. Because she was all around, now, Grace, how sweet the sound, and he wasn't getting her out until he stuck his head under hot water and scrubbed with carbolic soap and gargled with single malt.

"So sweet, now," Tatiana purred, throwing the perfume bottle stopper across the room (Tommy'd find it in the coal scuttle two nights from now blackened and never to come fully clean again, immortal, invisible). She undulated her hips and her soaking wet cunt sent a bolt of electricity through Tommy's cock and he moved, into her again and again, as the Duchess stroked the very tips of her fingers up and down the bridge of his nose and said, "...smelling sweet like a good woman and fucking like a whore."

"You're the whore," Tommy grunted, because he was never stupider and meaner than when he was fucking, it seemed. Tatiana pulled his head down to her breast, rolling her shoulder in encouragement until he gave in and took her nipple into his mouth.

"I'm nobility," she said, careless. Her tone made them into the same thing.

\---

Redcurrants around the softboiled eggs, toast points in a pile, two fried eggs, two sausages, half a tomato, a dish of deep crimson jam, a bowl of fruit; tobacco was all that Tommy felt able to understand, though, and he breathed smoke in and out as Mary came into the room on her neat little trotters. With the newspaper in her hand smelling of fresh ink that covered the faded smells of the cooling breakfast he didn't want, and as Mary uncovered the butter dish Tommy thought of her standing on the stairs, nose in the air, with her composed letterpress responses to the bare-breasted Duchess waving the pistol around. He let his gaze move over the breakfast tableau again, the wreath of jeweled berries making the eggcups pretty as Mary also moved to uncover the porridge bowl. Opening and uncovering things for him to consume and then inquiring after whether or not he'd had his _medicine_ , her tone gruel-mild, like butter wouldn't melt.

If he wanted to --

\-- he could make her watch as he went down on Tatiana, licking her until she was dripping and screaming for it, her pussy split open and pearly pink. He could bring May to the house and put his cock in her mouth while Mary served them tea and fruitcake and kept her face stone-still as May choked delicately. He could take Alfie's cock in his mouth with Alfie's rings pressed into the shaved sides of his head and Mary would have to stand there holding Alfie's cane and hat until he wanted them again.

Or he could tell her that he knew about her, his respectable housekeeper Mary, in love with him and despising him, standing naked by the bed reading from Leviticus: of burnt offerings of flesh and baked offerings of bread without yeast or honey, splashing of blood and leaders guilty of sin and that, oh dear! you _shouldn't_ shave the sides of your head and have tattoos;

\--her voice salubrious, guttural, when she lingered over the impurity of those stricken with defiling skin diseases, and the detestable act of lying with a man as with a woman.

She didn't miss a trick, did old Mary. And Tommy _had_ missed one, when he'd hired her on, thinking that her credentials in having worked in great houses had boded well for himself and Charlie being tended to instead of realizing that it made her a seasoned member of the service body politic, a nation whose customs he knew nothing about.

He knew, though, how to do this, to remind a woman exactly where her place was by bringing up the uses and desires of her body. Tommy had long since given up any guilt in using this particular tactic. He couldn't afford regret and the splashing of blood, and he'd always preferred Revelations, anyhow.

\---

John stripped off for the Russian women without much of a problem, laughing his arsehole high mocking laugh and making the entire process a joke, because John didn't know Tommy like Arthur did. What exactly, left to his own devices and counsel, Tommy was capable of.

John, when it came down to it, didn't know _Arthur_ like Tommy did.

Because it had been Tommy and Arthur in the trenches of adolescent horniness together, sneaking liquor when and where they could, talking about what they liked with each new independent discovery of what girls' legs felt like under your fingertips with the divots in their soft flesh from the garter belts, and how you could slip your fingers into their slick cunts so easily if you'd taken the care to press your thumb against their clits first, and how some of them would let you fuck them in the arse if they were scared of getting knocked up. It had been Tommy who'd politely turned over in the narrow bed they shared for lack of space and pretended to be asleep so Arthur could jerk off frantically after these talks, repeatedly soiling the scrap of towel he kept tucked under the mattress for exactly that purpose.

It was Tommy who'd heard all about it when Arthur had snuck off to the pictures once with money that was supposed to go towards buying coal, and he'd come back ranting about the actress in the film -- who it was had been lost to time and memory, but Arthur had been immediately and irrevocably obsessed with the dream of being allowed to fuck a rich woman, a beautiful immaculately-maintained woman who wouldn't give him a second look to pass him on the road but might spread her legs for him in the sheets, so long as nobody knew about it. Who'd give Arthur orders, who'd be wearing jewelry that was worth three of him.

You could view it as a kindness, if you looked at it from a certain angle, that Tommy'd arranged for that dream to come true in a limited capacity with Tatiana sliding her pearly slender fingers under Arthur's balls while John snickered and Tommy watched, and wondered: _is that what i look like when she touches me? Helpless, vulnerable, undone?_

Tommy watched, from his corner, and listened to Tatiana talk as she fondled his brother. He watched and heard Arthur's breathing go uneven, the same way it used to in that bed when they were boys with his hand stripping his cock. He watched and tucked it away, now that he finally had a facial expression to go along with Arthur's staggered breath and Tommy kept on wondering, wondered: _is this part of what it means to be a powerful man, to feel this good knowing i can control something as far outside the realm of my business as my brother's cockstand? Is that how arthur can find satisfaction, fulfillment, ease -- if he's told what to do, made to take it? Is that why he's enjoying it like he is? Is that why i enjoy it like i do?_

He clapped, when he brought the examination to an abrupt end. Tommy clapped, because Tatiana could be an actress. This was her being an actress; this was Tommy being in power.

Well done, Arthur. Now play nice.

\---

"You were jealous," Tatiana said. She had such huge eyes, they should have been melting and soft like candy, but they were, instead, like drinking down to the bottom of the bottle. "You wanted to kill me … or him."

_You're wrong_. But Tommy didn't say that, because it suited him, sometimes, to let people think they had him figured out. An impossibility, and Tommy could admit to himself that it wasn't due so much to any labyrinthine workings of his mind making him impenetrable; it was because he operated on the principle of having a plan, and then navigating around cave-ins when they inevitably came.

So instead he went with, "Why do you play games with people when there is no benefit to you?" and it wasn't so much that Tommy didn't care about the answer - he did, and he listened when it came, as Tatiana dug her nails into the walls and brought them falling down, and it led to the inevitable conclusion, that there should be fucking. Because Tommy'd worded his question exactly as he wanted it answered, because he already knew why the Duchess played games when there was a benefit.

He already knew he wanted her to play games with him.

To unzip him, to open him up, to lay him out on velvet to inspect and tell him what he was worth and check him for marks that might speak of betrayal.

Because nobody else would do that for Tommy … except for Alfie. Always the exception, was our Mr. Solomons, in more ways than Tommy could ever predict no matter how he tried and what angles he came at it from.

But ah, Alfie, he wasn't an option at this point, was he?

Not after Leviticus and those redcurrant-decorated eggs, and the _other_ , better-decorated egg, and Tommy Shelby had learned years ago and the hard way what happened when you put all your eggs in one basket.

You'd be left with a very empty basket while your one exception, well. While he made an omelette.

Tommy rose from the divan and followed Tatiana out of the main room, past people fucking and sucking and drinking and snorting, and with each step he put Alfie Solomons firmly out of his head. Well past time, too, when he started sounding like Alfie himself, baskets and bloody omelettes, for fuck's sake.

\---

and.

elsewhere john dances with the russian lads because he's been like the other russian lad who he'd held steady on the other side of the door, he's been among mad people and worked his hardest not to let it touch him, not to let _them_ touch him

elsewhere arthur fucks and fucks into the maid who sewed buttons back onto his shirt to cover his nakedness and he can't cum and he can't stand to feel the ring around his finger clinging and shining as bright as linda's eyes

elsewhere polly says sorry, sorry can you not do that please, can you just not do that please; but here

tommy bares his throat for it, tommy's the passover goat, tommy with grace's perfume heating up on his pulse as tatiana's hands bear down and close off his airways until he comes inside her and she lets up, and lets him breathe, and saves a wretch like him.

\---

Tatiana offered him a bottle of what she said was holy water and Tommy knocked it to one side as the room spun in his vision and his prick throbbed against his thigh. "Get that the fuck away from me," he gasped out, but even still the memory rose unbidden: him and Arthur as lads, lingering in the church vestibule while Polly confessed her sins and was given holy homework; him and Arthur dipping their fingers cold-tipped into the stone basin and cupping their hands to bring up scoops of holy water and gulp them down to see if there was any difference in the taste and if they could feel the Holy Spirit sluicing its way down their gullets into their sinful bellies.

Arthur got caught, of course, of course. It was the Act of Contrition for Arthur for that one.

Tommy, he got clean away. His own act of contrition was that when he pissed out the Holy Spirit, he made a resolution to himself to get Arthur one of those women, one day, who would take his cum into her jeweled hand instead of it going into that scrap of towel.

There's not a resolution Tommy Shelby's ever made that he's _forgotten_. Gone back on some of them, yes, maybe, when he's had to, but he's never forgotten.

Tatiana's hand pressed against his throat had just this day caressed the underside of Arthur's cock. Playing games that perhaps had no benefit to her, but did to Tommy. Who firmly resolved

With the help of thy Grace

To confess his sins (violence and theft and sodomy)

To do penance (not that there was a _fucking soul_ who cared)

And to amend his life (by pouring it all down the sink)

Amen.

\---

"There's a man waiting for me," Tatiana said standing out on that cold lonely road with so much money between them, and, "poor man," Tommy said back.

Anybody listening would have thought he was taking a cheap shot at the Duchess, _poor man_ , to have to deal with her kestrel eyes and her sapphire pussy and her games with orgasms. That was fine. Let them.

Tommy knew what he meant. And that was good enough.


End file.
